The only thing Trump is doing to end the opioid crisis rewards the companies that started it

A month after he said he would, President Donald Trump has yet to declare the opioid epidemic a national crisis.

He has, however, created a public-private partnership with some of the very companies that addicted America, according to Politico. It is one of a few recommendations that Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who is leading Trump's opioid-crisis task force, made to the president.

And it stands out, not just because it's the only thing the administration has actually done but also because it's the only one of the recommendations that rewards the companies responsible for the crisis at hand.

This is kind of like letting a group of foxes fix the gate in your proverbial hen house. Christie, the White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, and the National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, met with 14 pharmaceutical companies to discuss this on Monday.

Those companies include Purdue Pharmaceuticals, Allergan, and Johnson & Johnson. So let's talk about them.

If you're going to do public-private partnerships, why not choose companies that aren't under investigation for the following:

Purdue, the maker of Oxycontin, made sure that its drugs flooded the state of West Virginia by paying off a middleman, called a pharmacy benefit manager, to make sure its state insurers never limited prescriptions of their drugs.

Purdue, Johnson & Johnson, and Allergan, among others, are the subject of an investigation by Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri. She wants to know whether the companies misled or encouraged doctors to prescribe opioids for people who didn't really need them.

I could go on, but I shouldn't have to. These companies shouldn't be rewarded with lucrative partnerships with the government while they're being investigated for their role in an epidemic of deadly narcotics addictions.

Two more things to note here. First, it's not as if less addictive pain medication isn't on the market. But it's expensive, and insurance companies have often restricted patient access to them in favor of cheaper, more addictive opioids. The New York Times and ProPublica published a deep dive into that this week.

And the second thing. The New York Times' Maggie Haberman reported that other ideas the task force put forth had met a pretty simple roadblock: No one wants to pay for them. Seems as if we should work on these before handing a new revenue stream to companies that have yet to act in good faith when it comes to this epidemic.